Miscellaneous:

Sponsors:

Previous LCAs

Speakers

Invited Speakers

Damian Conway

Damian Conway is known as the "Mad Scientist of Perl". He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and recently ceased to be an honorary Associate Professorship with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

A popular speaker and trainer, he is also the author of many infamous modules including: Parse::RecDescent (parsing without lexing), Lingua::EN::Inflect (English transformations without a dictionary), Lingua::Romana::Perligata (Perl programming without English), Class::Multimethods (polymorphism without objects), Quantum::Superpositions (quantum computing without tears), and Coy (error messages without karma). A three-time winner of the Perl Conference's Larry Wall Award, Damian is now banned from future competition and instead has the conference's Best Technical Paper named after him.

He is a former columnist for The Perl Journal, and author of the books Object Oriented Perl and Perl Best Practices.

Damian is heavily implicated in the design of Perl 6, where his job is to tempt Larry with evil ideas, and to explain Larrys apocalyptic visions.

He also runs an international IT training company - Thoughtstream - which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.

He lists his personal interests as: reading, fitness, cinema, and Total World Domination.

In his spare time, he travels barefoot across the U.S. - teaching, playing his flute, having alopecic flashbacks, preaching pacifist philosophy, and generally beating the tar out of bad guys with his deadly kung-fu skills.

Chris Cormack

Chris has a BSc in computer science and a BA in Maths and Maori Studies. Chris has been with Katipo since early in 1997 and has worked on projects such as the Koha Library System (www.koha.org) and CafeNET (www.cafenet.co.nz).

Jon "maddog" Hall

Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International (www.li.org) a non-profit association of computer vendors who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System.

During his career which spans over thirty years, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, college educator and author. He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI.

Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several non-profit
organizations, including the USENIX Association.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995, the mod_info Apache module and he can be blamed for the ANSI92 SQL-defying LIMIT clause in mSQL 1.x which has now, at least conceptually, crept into both MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Prior to joining Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer in 2002, he was at a string of companies including Linuxcare, IBM, and Bell Canada working on Internet technologies.

David S. Miller

David has been working on the Linux kernel for about 10 years. He developed the initial port to the Sparc platform, and currently still maintains the sparc64 port. He has also been the kernel networking maintainer for about 8 years. He also is co-maintainer of the Sparc backend of GCC, and sits on the GCC steering committee.

Mark Shuttleworth

Mark studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town, and went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy. He sold Thawte to US company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation.

In April 2002 Mark flew in space for the first time, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station.
Mark has participated as a Debian developer since the early 1990s, and in 2004 he returned to the GNU/Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux, through Canonical Limited. In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. The foundation is used to pay Ubuntu contributors.

Mark was born and raised in South Africa, and is currently living in London.

linux.conf.au Speakers

Dave Airlie

Dave Airlie is an Irish kernel hacker, currently living in Sydney Australia and contracted for graphics work on gaming machines. He currently works on X.org and is the kernel maintainer for the 2.6 DRM.

Brian Aker

Brian Aker currently works on the MySQL Database Engine and spends the rest of his time working on Apache, MySQL and Perl modules, which include mod_layout and the Apache streaming services module, mod_mp3. In the past, he has been involved with projects for the Army Engineer Corps, The Virtual Hospital, and Slashdot. He currently works for MySQL as Director of Architecture and lives in Seattle with his dog Rosalynd.

Geoffrey Bennett

Geoffrey D. Bennett works for NetCraft Australia as their Senior Systems Engineer, where he gets to play with Linux all day. He is an LA Committee member, was a core organiser for LCA2004, and runs the LinuxSA Users Group in Adelaide. Geoffrey presented a talk at LCA2003 on his revision control system "Katie", and a talk at LCA2004 on using Clipsal's C-Bus system with Linux. His claim to fame is inspiring the "Windows Refund Day" in 1999 with his Toshiba laptop saga (he still has the cheque, and the laptop).

Hugh Blemings

Hugh has been a licensed Amateur (Ham) Radio operator since 1991 holding the Australian Limited callsign VK1YYZ. He has been a casual user of Linux since the mid '90s and it has been his operating system of choice since 1997 and profession since 1999. He has worked on various pieces of open source software and is one of the original authors of gnokii (http;//gnokii.org) He also wrote Linux kernel drivers for the Keyspan range of USB-Serial adapters.
Hugh is currently the manager of the Canberra based OzLabs team at IBM's Linux Technology Centre.

Matt Brown

I am the network administrator for the CRCnet Wireless Research Network. I am involved in all aspects of CRCnet, from planning and implementing new links, through to monitoring and maintaining the network. My particular projects involve developing the CRCnet Configuration System and assisting others in wireless mesh network and rapid deployment research.

Rodrigo Ceron Ferreira de Castro

Rodrigo Ceron was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He studied computer engineering in the State
University of Campinas where he also participated in digital speech synthesis researches.
He got the ``Instituto de Engenharia'' (Engineering Institute) prize and CREA-SP (Engineering Council) Certification of Honor to the Merit when he graduated.
The author has been a free software lover since 2000 and has contributed to open source projects during his free time. He works at IBM Linux Technology Center since 2004.

Donald Christie

Donald Christie is a founder and director of Catalyst IT Limited, a New Zealand based open source development company.
Donald has a been involved in IT for 20 years developer, architect and company owner. He and Catalyst are strong advocates for FOSS within the NZ business and government areans.

Michael Cohen

Dr. Michael Cohen graduated as a bachelor of Electrical Engineering
from the University of Queensland in 1996 with first class honours. He
received his PhD from the Australian National university in 2001 in
the field of Physical Sciences (Semiconductor Lasers).
Michael has been working in the Australian Department of Defence since
2001 where he is currently a senior technical advisor to the
Information Security Group. Michael specialises in incident response
and forensics, as well as information security.

Russell Coker

Russell Coker is employed by Red Hat to work on NSA Security Enhanced Linux. He has been working continuously on SE Linux since 2001. Prior to joining Red Hat he mostly worked as a Unix administrator at ISPs.

Michael Ellerman

First started programming C sometime during highschool, using a borrowed copy of Borland Turbo C.
Completed the four year Bachelor of Software Engineering, with first class Honours at ANU. Worked on software for Fedsat (http://www.auspace.com.au/projects/fedsat.htm) as part of my final year project.
Spent two years at HIC working for IBM in a UNIX support role. Managed 80+ AIX & Linux servers with ~4-5 staff and a lot of scripts.
Moved to IBM OzLabs in early 2004 to work on PPC64 kernel development.

Rafael Espíndola

Computer engineer student at the State University of Campinas
Main developer of the GCC Scheme Compiler (http://gna.org/projects/gsc)
ported the support for the emc6d102 temperature sensor to the 2.6 linux kernel.
from march 2004 to march 2005 had a part time job at the Linux Technology Center (LTC), IBM.
did some preliminary work on porting debian to the powerpc64 architecture (http://lists.debian.org/debian-pnowerpc/2004/09/msg00418.html)

Andrew Fitzsimon

Andy is a graphic designer with a passion for open source software. Inkscape in particular.
He is the developer of the ubuntu icon theme, 'Human'. He also develops artwork materials for translation at Red Hat APAC and trains staff in the wonders of using Scribus, GIMP and Inkscape.

Bdale Garbee

Bdale serves as HP Open Source & Linux CTO. His background includes many years on both UNIX internals and embedded systems. He helped jump-start ports of Debian GNU/Linux to 5 architectures other than i386, and has served as Debian Project Leader. Bdale is also well-known as KB0G in the amateur radio hobby, where he tinkers on everything from software defined radio to building amateur satellites.

Matthew Garrett

Having been (at various stages) a sysadmin, coder, unemployed layabout, international jetsetter and medical student, Matthew Garrett is now working towards a PhD in bioinformatics. He is quite happy to fix your laptop, and would prefer you not to mention fruitflies in his presence.

David Gibson

David Gibson is a member of the IBM Linux Technology, working from Canberra, Australia. Recently he has worked on Linux hugepage support and performance counter support for ppc64, as well as the device tree compiler. In the past, he has worked on bringup for various ppc64 and ppc64 embedded systems, the orinoco wireless driver, ramfs, and a userspace checkpointing system (esky).

Simon Glass

Simon Glass has been involved in Linux as a user and programmer for many years. He has worked as a software engineer in the embedded world. He has held several positions at the chip design company ARM PLC in Cambridge, UK and Austin, Texas. Returning to his home country of New Zealand, he set up Bluewater Systems in 1996 to promote the benefits of ARM technology. The company is now devoted to Linux-based embedded systems.
Simon Glass holds a B.Sc (Hons 1) in Computer Science from Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Julien Goodwin

Free software developer and local community member. Recent talks at local user groups include:
* Network installation from linux servers (To be presented at LUV August 2005)
* Programming Asterisk (LUV-ProgSig May 2005)
* Torture Testing web sites (Melb-PHP March 2005)
I have been a mejor developer and (as of March) project lead of a module for the Asterisk PBX that supports the Cisco VoIP phones.

Dave Hall

For the last few years I have been running my own business as a FOSS focused IT Consultant. For the last 2 years I have been the API Coordinator for phpGroupWare, a web based groupware suite. I will one day get around to finishing my GradDip IT (Internet Software Dev) at Swinburne University.

Peter Hutterer

Peter Hutterer is a PhD student at the Wearable Computers Laboratory at the University of South Australia. He studied in Austria and worked on a project using watch-like computers during his internship in Australia. When he came back to Adelaide to commence his PhD program, he switched back to desktop sized computers and is now researching real-time groupware for distributed groups.

Adam Jackson

Adam Jackson works on beating sense into X. As such, his to-do list is very long. His rapidly growing collection of video cards ensures he'll be kept busy with it. His audio geekery habit helps keeps him more or less sane.

Van Jacobson

I've been hacking on TCP/IP for far longer than I care to remember. I spent 25 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as head of the network research group then two years at Cisco as chief scientist before leaving to co-found Packet Design LLC. I'm currently chief scientist at two Packet Design spinouts, Packet Design Inc. and Precision I/O.

Olof Johansson

Olof Johansson works on Linux for PowerPC at PA Semi. While he did play around with Linux back in the early 90's, he was away from it for many years and finally returned in 2003. Most of his contributions so far have been in the architecture-specific parts for PPC64.

Besides Linux, he's also poked around the kernel on NetBSD, FreeBSD and other operating systems.

In his spare time he enjoys working on old Volvos, occasionally also driving them.

Jeremy Kerr

Jeremy Kerr works for the IBM Linux Technology Center in Canberra ('OzLabs'), as an Open Source Software developer. His interests lie in operating systems research, kernel design and networking.
Jeremy has contributed to a range of Open Source projects, such as nfsim (the netfilter simulation environment), K42 (a research operating system), patchwork (a web-based patch-tracking system) and Linux. He has previously spoken at linux.conf.au, the Ottawa Linux Symposium and the Netfilter Developers' Workshop.

Michael Kerrisk

Michael Kerrisk has been using and programming computers since 1978, starting on a PDP-11
(good) that didn't have Unix (unfortunate). He only found Unix in 1987,
but they've been good friends since then. In 2004, after a few years as a
contributor, he became the maintainer of sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 of the
Linux manual pages (the sections used by programmers on Linux
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages/). He is currently working on
a book that provides a detailed description of the Linux (and Unix) system
call API. Michael lives in Munich, Germany, but he is originally from
Christchurch, NZ, and says that he's an envoy from Linux City to the
Mirror City.

Thomas Lange

Thomas Lange studied computer science and has now been working as a system administrator for over twelve years. Most of his job is done automatically by shell and perl scripts, which do the installation and administration of several Sun Solaris workstation networks. Since 1999
he has been developing the fully automatic installation for Debian GNU/Linux, since 2000 he's also a Debian Developer. He gave several
talks and tutorials about FAI on conferences like Linux Kongress, SANE, FOSDEM, SUCON, UKUUG, debconf, Cebit and at some local Linux meetings.

Martin Langhoff

With several years of involvement in e-learning and e-govt projects in the NZ/AU space. Designing, planning and coding in projects with a focus on open source tools , e-learning, dublin core metadata, etc. Martin is a contributor/developer to several open source projects. Heavily involved in the Moodle and Debian projects, and maintainer of the Moodle "stable" release.

Greg "Groggy" Lehey

Greg Lehey is a senior software developer at MySQL AB. He is also a FreeBSD and NetBSD developer and an ex-member of the FreeBSD core team. He has been in the computer industry for 30 years, most of them spent in Germany, in which time he has performed most jobs, ranging from kernel development to product management, from systems programming to systems administration, from processing satellite data to programming petrol pumps, from the production of CD-ROMs of ported free software to DSP instruction set design. He is the author of "Porting UNIX Software" (O'Reilly and Associates, 1995) and "The Complete FreeBSD" (O'Reilly and Associates, 2003).

Arjen Lentz

Arjen Lentz (36) is originally from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Together with his wife, baby daughter and black cat he resides in Kenmore (Brisbane), Australia.
Arjen initially started with programming, but has since branched out to blends initial geekness with more human interaction - like writing and training. He has been working for MySQL AB since 2001.
He is now MySQL AB's Community Relations Manager, a job which involves cool stuff like jet-lag, hanging out with MySQL users and drinking assorted beverages on company time. He is also the program chair for the MySQL Users Conference.

Philip Lindsay

I developed libgmail--the Python binding for Gmail <http://libgmail.sf.net/>-- and did a lot of the initial hacking of Google Maps <http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html>, developed the first standalone viewer for it <http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/gmaps-standalone/> and various other bits and pieces: <http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/google-maps-embed-how-to/>, <http://mygmaps.com/>.
I was invited to O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference earlier in the year and had a "booth" at their Where Fair.
As penance for my leading people astray into proprietary mapping APIs :-) I am now involved with the OpenLayers project <http://www.openlayers.org> that aims to provide a dynamic-drag tile based map and GIS web interface that is standards compliant with OGC's WMS & WFS specifications and BSD licensed.

Trent Lloyd

Trent Lloyd is studying "Internetworking and Security" and the Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia.
His involvement with free software includes the Avahi Project, the Ubuntu "Masters of the Universe (MOTU)" team and a number of small contributions to the GNOME project.
He has previously presented at Linux.conf.au 2003 and 2004 mini-conferences on IPv6 related topics, as well as organizing the IPv6 Mini-Conference in both years and being an organiser of the 2003 Perth conference.

Paul Mackerras

Paul is the maintainer for the Linux kernel on PowerPC machines. He works in the IBM Linux Technology Center where he works on Linux for the IBM PowerPC-architecture machines, and in particular the pSeries and iSeries machines. Paul has been working on Linux on PowerPC since 1996, when he ported Linux to the Power Macintosh. He is the maintainer for the Linux PPP package and the author of dirdiff and gitk. He also works on various other open-source projects.

Ian McDonald

I am currently undertaking a PhD in regards to congestion control and have previously had 15 years in the workforce. I am currently developing DCCP for Linux which is in the process of being merged into the kernel

Paul E. McKenney

Paul E. McKenney is a distinguished engineer at IBM and has worked on SMP, NUMA, and RCU algorithms for longer than he cares to admit. Prior to that, he worked on packet-radio and Internet protocols (but long before the Internet became popular), system administration, realtime systems, and even business applications. His hobbies include running and the usual house-wife-and-kids habit.

Marc MERLIN

I've been using linux for more than 10 years, both as a sysadmin and a
sunday coder :-)
I have worked for Network Appliance, SGI, VA Linux, Sourceforge.net, and
now work as a server sysadmin at Google.
I've enjoyed hacking on mail in the last years, be it exim, mailman, or more
recently SpamAssassin and SA-Exim.
For fun, when I'm not hacking away, I go snowboarding, mountain biking,
racing my turbo Mazda MX-5 and BMW M5, as well as flying.

Brendan O'Dea

Vik Olliver

Vik is a longhair programmer/developer/artist with workshops in the Waitakere rainforest. He fights fires, programs PIC and PCs, raises kids and cats, welds, cuts, cooks and grows hydroponics for space research. Specialisation is for insects.

Keith Packard

Keith Packard has been developing open source software since 1986, focusing
on the X Window System since 1987, designing and implementing large parts of
the current implementation. He is currently employed by HP as a member of
the Cambridge Research Laboratory working on window system technologies for
pervasive and mobile computing. He received a Usenix Lifetime Achievement
award in 1999 and an Open Source Grand Master award in 2003.

Wayne Piekarski

Wayne is currently the Assistant Director of the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia, one of the leading labs in the world for augmented reality and wearable computer based research. He is also a lecturer in Computer Graphics and Computer Systems Architecture with the School of Computer and Information Science. He has been invited to speak about his research at a number of international conferences all over the world, including the last five LCAs and was awarded a much prized LCA best speaker award in 2002! Wayne has worked with Linux since 1995 when he first installed Slackware and kernel 1.1.59, and has used it ever since for his development work.

Tim Potter

Tim Potter is a software engineer working for Hewlett-Packard on manageability for Itanium servers running Linux, which is actually much less boring than it sounds.
Tim has been involved in Open Source development since 1998 when he made his first commit to the Samba project.

Phillip Allan Ridley

Completed BE(Comp) degree in RAAF. Left in 1997 and joined fledgling bigpond.com when we had 30K users. Managed testing, security, systems architecture and programming roles in that time. Left in 2002 when we had 1.5M users. Worked a year at F2.com.au as systems architect, specialising in large scale systems. Recently designed www.unwired.com.au WiMAX-style WISP. We are now the largest non-line-of-sight wireless broadband network in the world with 30K+ customers, in just on 12 months, and intend to be the first 802.16e large scale deployment in the world. We are heavily linux/OSS based, (costs and short timeframes being one issue why) and had to solve some difficult and unusual problems using linux, right down to refactoring some common applications for standard protocols, and designing some quite sophisticated network tools to help us manage it (we have almost 200 RF base stations). Fun stuff you might like to hear about.

Deepak Saxena

Deepak Saxena is a software engineer at
MontaVista Software whose main role is porting and maintaining the Linux kernel on various ARM platforms. Before working on ARM, he was at Intel and worked on the I2O stack for Linux and unfortunately had to write some drivers for some closed-source operating systems. He has been using Linux since 1993 and playing with the kernel since 1998. His favorite editor is vim and his favorite email program is mutt. When not sitting in front of his computers, he's usually cooking, out on a bike ride, or hunting down new beers to quench his thirst.

Aaron Seigo

Aaron is a KDE core developer who works on a variety of desktop technologies ranging from the desktop shell itself to usability concerns. He is also active within the community of users and developers, heading up such projects as the Open Source Desktop Workshops and the Plasma project.

Andrew Tridgell

Theodore Tso

Theodore Ts'o is the maintainer of e2fsprogs and one of the maintainers of the ext2/3 filesystem. He organizes the annual Linux Kernel Summit, and sits on the board of the Free Standards Group and Usenix.

Jean-Marc Valin

Jean-Marc Valin has a PhD, a master's degree and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Sherbrooke. His PhD thesis focuses on bringing hearing capabilities to a mobile robotics platform, including sound source localization and separation. His other research interests cover speech coding and he has developed the Speex codec, aimed at low bitrate speech communications. He is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Seth Vidal

Systems administrator at duke university, formerly in the physics department now at the office of information technology. Lead developer on Yum. Maintainer of CentOS. Packager for Fedora Extras and member of the Fedora Extras Steering Committee.
Currently living in North Carolina, US and recently developed an interest in writing pens.

Amos Waterland

Mats Wichmann

Mats Wichmann has been kicking around first UNIX, then the Linux / open source world for rather a long time until finding his current home at Intel Corporation working on the LSB project. Mats has been a developer with the LSB project since 2001, and was elected LSB Chairman in January 2004, which role he still holds. At Intel he's titled Linux Standards Architect in the Opensource Technology Center. In the past he has worked as a consultant, trainer, and courseware developer. He has past standards/ABI experience with the MIPS ABI Group where he worked as technical director and is an Austin Group and an IEEE Standards Association member. Mats is co-author of the book Building Applications with the Linux Standard Base.

Matthew Wilcox

Matthew has been a Linux kernel hacker since 1998
and became the sym2 driver maintainer in 2003.
He presented papers at LCA in 2001, 2003 and 2004
as well as at OLS and UKUUG. He currently works
on the ia64 kernel for HP and leads the parisc port
in an unofficial capacity.

Carl Worth

Carl is the maintainer and primary author of the cairo graphics library. He works for Red Hat doing desktop-related development. He also has experience with embedded Linux systems. Carl has MS/BS degress in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University.

Jimi Xenidis

Jimi has been programming computers since he was able to find a Radio Shack store manager that would let him play with the TRS-80 that no one ever wanted to buy. He currently is a member IBM's TJ Watson Research Laboratory where he tinkers with Hypervisors, Processors, K42 Research OS, Linux, Simulators, and Tool-chains. Prior to IBM he worked on other OSes for other companies.

Christopher Yeoh

Christopher Yeoh is an employee of the IBM Linux Technology Center,
working at OzLabs in Canberra, Australia. He has been using Linux
since 1994 and worked on the Linux Standard Base between 2000 and
2005. He now works on Linux and K42 kernel development, primarily
doing research on memory management.